The Agony of Being a Vikings Fan

Vikings fans

At this point, being a fan of anything is a foolhardy proposition. The Internet has become our great engine of disillusionment: all our heroes are sexual deviants who are in it for the money. These days, it’s naive to fan out on anybody, whether an actor or a politician or a musician, so why would a grown adult root for a professional sports franchise? Especially a professional franchise with a reputation for heartbreaking futility in the biggest possible moments? Alcoholics Anonymous defines insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Which brings me to my point: glug, glug, glug.

My favorite team is hosting a playoff game this Sunday against the New Orleans Saints. We’re really good this year. And yes of course it’s “we”—I’ve been wearing purple longer than most of the twentysomethings pulling paychecks from the actual team. So yeah, we’re 13-3, and the strengths of the team fit historical Vikings family values: a dominant defense and an opportunistic offense led by a scrambling, journeyman quarterback and a hometown hero from Detroit Lakes. We’re hosting a second round playoff game for only the fourth time in my lifetime. And we’re also enjoying some of the best Vikings coverage ever. Ben Goessling, a local guy made good who first covered the Vikings for ESPN before coming over to the Strib, has been doing an exceptional job. He really gets us and has been keeping things in context for a neurotic Vikings fan base all season. Earlier this year, he wrote a trenchant story about the Vikings playoff record in the last 25 years, making the point that only four teams, the Packers, the Patriots, the Steelers and the Colts, have qualified for the playoffs more often than the Vikings. Those four teams, of course, have rostered an elite quarterback (Favre/Rodgers, Brady, Roethlisberger, and Manning/Luck, respectively) for long stretches, while the Vikings have not. And this week, Goessling delivered more desperately needed serotonin to Vikings nation by explaining that on the brink of our playoff run, this year’s team isn’t obsessing over historic failure because why would they? Only one player remains from the team that lost the NFC Championship to the Saints in 2009.

Unfortunately, deep down, I don’t care that the Vikings don’t care. Somehow in my mental hierarchy, I’ve been able to separate things like facts and context and reality from how I really feel about the team. And that’s the point I suppose, of being a fan: it’s not about how we think, it’s about how we feel. We’re emotional and passionate and nervous—we’re fanatical. And seeing those gold and black uniforms on the opposing sideline on Sunday will conjure up past trauma.

And maybe (best Dr. Phil drawl) this is okay. I’m 41-years-old. I’m a part of the Metrodome generation—the sheltered by Teflon skies generation. I grew up knowing that the Vikings were historically great in the ‘70s, but also knowing that they could never win the big one: 0-4 in the Super Bowl. This Vikings lore was passed down to me as sure as any by Mother Goose or Big Bird. I grew up understanding that the Vikings would crush people in the playoffs, especially at home outside in Minnesota’s cold, but would wither in the less morally temperate climes of California or Florida. Not that it was always warm weather’s fault either: sometimes it was the officials who screwed us. I wasn’t even born in time for the ’75 Vikings play-off loss to the Cowboys, the first Hail Mary in NFL history, the upset that many Vikings fans believe killed Fran Tarkenton’s father (Fake news, by the way). My dad was at that Met that day and no, he didn’t throw the glass bottle that conked out the poor ref who ignored Drew Pearson’s push off and raised his arms to signal the deciding touchdown, but I’ve heard the story enough times and I’ve seen the NFL Films footage enough times to picture that precise moment.

But besides all that, my purple psychological scars aren’t as old as the first generation’s, the scars caused by the hallowed patriarchy of Bud Grant, but they are old enough to drink. At almost every major stage in my lifetime, the Vikings have broken my heart. So instead of sensibly confining this disappointment to the past, like a stoic Bud-esque Scandihoovian, maybe it would be constructive, therapeutic even, to revisit the various levels of Vikings losing here. To read about them with the benefit of hindsight, finally rid of the blinding heat of childish/mannish-boy expectation. Think of the following as an exorcism, or if you’re younger than I am, or have kids that are becoming Vikings fans, as an instruction manual. Let’s get rid of all this shit, so we can come as close as possible to actually enjoying our team’s performance on Sunday.

Early childhood memories of professional sports flicker and fade. I remember Super Bowl XVII playing in the background of a birthday party in my parents’ basement, Marcus Allen running over the Redskins. Or was it Dan Marino choking against the Redskins. I remember the first illicit thrill of personal investment when my dad convinced me to bet $1 on the Patriots in Super Bowl XX: and I remember the pain of losing an entire week’s salary as Tony Easton was swallowed up by the Monsters of the Midway. 10 years old in 1986, I remember lying on my living room couch listening to the Vikings on the hi-fi, losing to the Houston Oilers in the penultimate game of the season, eliminating us from the playoffs. In 1986, we were only a couple seasons removed from the 3-13 Les Steckel debacle, which followed the drama of Bud Grant’s return and re-retirement, so we weren’t supposed to be any good anyway that season. But I remember loving Tommy Kramer. And then, in 1987, at 11-years-old, I have total recall for the first time: vivid audio and visual memories of the entire season. It was a strike year, so my Teamster dad took me down to the players’ picket line at Metrodome in one of the first weeks of the season. I remember interrupting Steve Jordan and Darrin Nelson as they were barbecuing burgers to ask them to sign my football cards. The Vikings were the only NFL team to lose all three of our replacement player games, so at 8-7 we barely qualified for the play-offs as a wild card. And then we went on a famous play-off run: destroying the favored Saints 44-10 at the Superdome in the Wild Card game and going to Candlestick and beating the daylights out of Jerry Rice and Joe Montana 36-24 with my childhood hero Anthony Carter catching everything Wade Wilson threw in his general direction. If disappointment is always relative to expectations, my expectations had grown to unmanageable levels by the time we went to Washington and lost 17-10 in a muddy, rain soaked NFC Championship game. I remember watching on my parents TV in our living room, wishing I could travel back in time somehow, wishing I had a real life replay option, and this time I would see Scott Studwell corral that Doug Williams pop up for an interception, or that Darrin Nelson would hold onto that five yard out on fourth down in the end zone. We could’ve gone to the Super Bowl that year. And we would’ve won that one—the Redskins destroyed the Broncos 42-10. This Vikings fan thing was traumatic, sure, but it was fun feeling for the hometown team this much. And I expected to be back in the NFC Championship game soon.

Age 22. 1998 NFC Championship Game. Vikings lose 27-30 in OT to the Atlanta Falcons in the Metrodome.

More than 10 years later, the Vikings still hadn’t come as close to the Super Bowl as we did back in ’87. And in the intervening years I learned something strange from my purple tribe: self-pity. I grew up realizing that within the pro sports world, Minnesota is considered a small market, and to be honest, following national coverage of our teams, that inferiority complex wears on you. We continued to make the play-offs where we would lose to teams from New York and San Francisco and Chicago. But we were always good, always in it, maybe not as great when held up to our own legendary Purple People Eaters past, but we still enjoyed dominant defenses for most of the post People Eaters years: boasting rosters with stars like Chris Doleman and Keith Millard and Joey Browner followed by those with John Randle and Jared Allen and Kevin Williams. We would win our division regularly, or qualify as a wild card, and then lose immediately, usually to a team like the 49ers with either Joe Montana or Steve Young or the Giants with Phil Simms. In 1992, I loved our new head coach Denny Green, partially because he was so brash and upsetting. In 1997 he released a book titled Dennis Green: No Room for Crybabies where he announced his plans for buying the team and upsetting the natural Minnesota corporate order. The Sheriff was a quarterback whisperer to ancient relics like Jim McMahon and Warren Moon and we still made the playoffs on the reg, but again, we never went far. And then in the spring of 1998, two things happened. That winter, the team was bought by a used car salesman from San Antonio, Red McCombs who immediately slapped a “Purple Pride!” slogan onto his new toy. And that spring, Denny Green drafted Randy Moss.

Randy Moss is my favorite athlete ever. Until that point, it had been Larry Bird, but in 1998, I was 22, fresh out of college, and Moss reflected my cocky, angry young man existential status. He was my guy, full of toxic masculinity and resentment for the teams that passed on him in the draft for smoking weed or whatever, and this season would be payback, with Moss promising to “do whatever I can to wreck this whole league.” My team, in little flyover Minnesota, finally had the best player in the game, and watching them in 1998 was almost a surreal experience. We started out a little shaky, but by October the Purple would crush teams on the biggest stages: We went into Lambeau and whipped the Packers 37-24. On Thanksgiving in Dallas, Moss scored 3 touchdowns as we torched the Cowboys 46-36. I was a waiter at Sidney’s on Grand, flush with throwaway cash from Saturday night, and Sundays became a rolling party—two for ones at Liquor Lyles and then we would celebrate the inevitable blowout at Whiskey Junction on the West Bank watching a band called Wallace Hartley and the Titanics. (This was only one year after Leo and Kate, too! Just zero sense of foreshadowing, evidently.) The Titanics would cover Janis Joplin and the Beatles and throw out trucker hats to the crowd. I remember catching one and kneeling down on the dance floor and pointing to the sky like Cris Carter.

At the end of the season, we were 15-1. We broke the record for the highest scoring offense of all time. We hosted the Cardinals in the division round at home and whupped them, 41-21. Back in the NFC Championship game for the first time since I was a little kid, we would host the Atlanta Falcons, the “Dirty Birds” as they called themselves.

One scheduling problem: on NFC Championship weekend, I had a gig guiding Fargo church kids on a winter camping trip in the Boundary Waters. I wasn’t going to miss this game, so when we stayed over at a tiny Lutheran church in Finland, Minnesota the Friday night before arriving at the trailhead, I stole a grip of wire hangers from the church basement. The next day I skied in with a boom box on my sled and when we set up camp somewhere north of Snowbank Lake, I had one of the kids climb a tree and fasten my makeshift 25-foot wire hanger antennae to a branch. We got the game clear as a bell out of Hayward, Wisconsin with John Rooney and Matt Millen on the call. We all sat around the campfire that Saturday night and listened together. Most of the Fargo kids were Vikings fans, but one of them, kind of the runt of the litter, pulled for the Falcons the entire time. I remember he hated his Vikings-fan dad or something. Or maybe it was just early teenage angst. Who knows, but it didn’t really annoy me until it became apparent that the Falcons weren’t going away in this game. And when Gary Anderson missed that field goal—his first miss of the year—near the end of regulation, and when Robert Smith ran out of bounds allowing the Falcons to force overtime, and when Denny took a knee at the end of regulation, and when the Falcons kicker Morten Anderson won it in overtime…well I hiked out to the middle of the frozen lake to get away from that kid. I didn’t want to say anything blasphemous about his dad or his God. I stood in complete silence on that lake near the Canadian border and smoked a cigarette by myself. It was supposed to be a tobacco free church trip but I couldn’t believe it. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

Age 33. 2009 NFC Championship Game. Vikings lose 28-31 in OT to the New Orleans Saints in New Orleans.

By 2009, I finally knew better. I had grown more cynical about sports in general—I knew more about athletes’ private lives than ever and because of literally decades of thirsty billionaires lobbying for new stadiums, I knew more about the business of the game. After years of fantasy football, I understood that the Vikings couldn’t get back to the Super Bowl because we never had the best quarterback. More than anything, I learned that’s what matters in life: You need a Peyton Manning or a Tom Brady in order to win big.

The last, great, in-his-prime Vikings quarterback was Tommy Kramer. Most of the time we were rehabbing an old guy, like Jim McMahon or Warren Moon or Randall Cunningham or Jeff George, or grooming a new guy, like Brad Johnson or Daunte Culpepper or Tarvaris Jackson. We never had THE GUY. Daunte was as close as we ever came to drafting and developing our own stud QB. At times, he was awesome—he had a cannon arm and he was as powerful a runner as Cam Newton before Cam Newton was Cam Newton. In 2000, in his second year, he took us to the NFC Championship game at the Meadowlands outside of New York, where the game snowballed on us because of stupid special teams mistakes, and we ended up getting embarrassed 41-0. We struggled under an interception-crazy Culpepper the season after that, and it cost Denny Green his job. Red McCombs hired Green’s offensive line coach Mike Tice at the end of the 2001 season. And then, probably due to stadium politics frustration, McCombs seemed to be getting progressively cheaper fielding degraded rosters and wasting Moss in his prime. But Culpepper kept getting better, breaking Dan Marino’s record for total yardage in 2004. But then in 2005, with Moss traded in the offseason to the Raiders, Culpepper got his knee completely shredded by Carolina’s Chris Gamble in the seventh game of the year. And in the offseason, he was arrested and charged with something called lascivious conduct for his role in the Love Boat scandal.

Somewhere in the chaos, Red McCombs had sold the team to New Jersey real estate developer Zygi Wilf. Wilf fired Mike Tice and brought in new head coach Brad Childress. In the lubricant-bespoiled wake of the Love Boat scandal, Childress came in preaching the morality of team over individual (and a new Vikings “code of conduct” presumably ruled out any team building that combined flown in strippers from Atlanta and rented houseboats on Lake Minnetonka). Culpepper’s negotiations for a new contract broke down with Wilf and coach Chilly, and just like that, they traded #11 to the Dolphins.

A season later we drafted Adrian Peterson, rebuilt the defense, and, after all of that insanity, the overriding story remained the same: Our team was playoff quality—with Adrian Peterson, we had the best running back in the league—but at quarterback, we seemed to be at square one again, with Chilly grooming a second round pick named Tarvaris Jackson.

In 2008, Mpls.St.Paul Magazine would fly me down to Orlando to write a profile on our moody, self-conscious young quarterback, who was perpetually worried about rumors that he was about to be replaced by an aging Brett Favre. That summer, T.Jack would be safe.

Then, as training camp was just about underway 2009, after another frustrating T.Jack year that ended up with a home playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles, and at the end of a second straight summer of a long distance flirtation with Favre, we finally signed the former Packers legend. This was a bizarre turn of events for Vikings fans, and the strangest thing about it was how quickly and how easily we adapted to rooting for a guy we used to hate, like, the year before. My brother immediately bought a gorgeous $300 white and purple #4 FAVRE jersey. We live amongst a vocal Green Bay diaspora, and it felt good to stick it to them with their own guy. This would be another karmically confusing Vikings revenge tour.

In week 3 against the 49ers, Favre proved he still had magic left when he threw a winning 32-yard-touchdown pass to a fourth string WR with two seconds left at the Metrodome. Favre beat the Packers and his old understudy Aaron Rodgers both times we saw them that season, too. At the age of 40, Favre had an incredible season, one of the best of his long career, throwing for more than 4,000 yards with 33 touchdown passes against only seven interceptions. Adrian Peterson led the league in touchdowns. The Vikings finished 12-4 and were the second seed in the playoffs.

The big story that year in the NFL wasn’t really Favre-to-the-Vikings though—it was the New Orleans Saints, who started the season 13-0 and were becoming the poster children for a city that was coming back from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. So after the Vikings took care of Tony Romo and the Cowboys in the division round, we traveled to New Orleans to face the Saints in the Superdome.

Drew Brees and that Saints offense was scary, but we had All Day and Brett Favre, and we could put points on anybody. The game was an incredibly intense back and forth battle. We came out hot, taking the lead on a Peterson touchdown run. The Saints tied it up with a long Brees touchdown pass. At halftime it was tied, and the Saints came out and took the lead in the third quarter. Honestly, the game shouldn’t have been that close—Adrian Peterson fumbled three times in the game, losing two of them. But he also scored three touchdowns, his last coming in the fourth quarter with 8 minutes left, tying the game. Somehow, after losing the turnover battle 4-0, the Vikings had the ball with 2 and a half minutes left in the game, and we were driving. I was at my friends Josh and Keri’s beautiful house in Uptown, surrounded by true Vikings fans, with a great spread that by the end of the game had been completely stress-demolished, and when the Vikings were driving for the win I started getting texts from all over the country. Texts like, “ARE WE GONNA DO THIS??” “IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING??” “WE’RE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL!!”

And then a flag. Twelve men on the field. How the fuck? Out of field goal range now, but still third down. And then Favre scrambling to his right, throwing across his body into the middle of the field, and it was intercepted by a Saints cornerback.

All these years later, and this still hurts to type. To rewatch on youtube. Unfuckingbelievable. But I remember, almost immediately, realizing that we were fooling ourselves right up until that fateful moment, and being embarrassed for all of us. I don’t remember immediately walking out into Keri and Josh’s backyard and puking their amazing spread into the snow. But years later, Josh reminds me of this, and he also remembers our Packers fan friend Adam Switlick looking on and saying, “That shit was terrible—I sincerely feel bad for you guys—but now you know what it’s like to root for Favre.” For years, I made fun of Packers fans as Favre was setting the all time interceptions record. What right did we have rooting for this guy just because he switched green and gold for purple and gold? It really exposed how absurd it was, as Jerry Seinfeld joked, “rooting for laundry.” Did we learn anything? Not really—Favre came back for one more year and sucked. And then near the end of that year the Metrodome collapsed. We resumed feeling sorry for ourselves.

Age 41. Vikings vs. Saints at U.S. Bank Stadium. Who knows what will happen.

So now here we are. We played outside for a couple seasons, just long enough to lose the coldest playoff game in Vikings history on a terribly snap-hooked Blair Walsh field goal attempt. Last year, our quarterback almost lost his leg on a no contact injury in training camp. But in 2014, we hired Mike Zimmer, more emotional and profane than Bud Grant, but another paradigmatic man’s man of a head coach, and he’s won the NFC North two of the last three years. Our defense is nasty. Best in the league; best since the Purple People Eaters. And at 13-3, we’re on the cusp of another deep playoff run that begins on Sunday. It’s the second best Vikings record of my lifetime, behind 1998’s 15-1. It’s setting up for a perfect revenge tour: first the Saints in the Divisional, where we can avenge 2009, and then the Falcons in the NFC Championship Game, where we can avenge 1998. And then maybe the Steelers in the Super Bowl, where we can start working on my dad’s demons, and avenge our loss in Super Bowl IX.

Supposedly, the players don’t care about any of this stuff.

But we do.

And that’s the thing—narratives are dangerous, and filled with half-truths we tell ourselves, but they’re how our mammal brains understand the world. It’s called romance! And maybe they’re spoiled millionaires owned by crooked billionaires, but the sport is violent and filled with sacrifice and the only reason we care about it is because it represents how hard life is supposed to be (and we don’t have to suffer the actual concussions while watching it on our flat screens). Even now, at 41, I can still see that the Vikings are heroes, and the hero’s journey is supposed to be filled with trials and angst. And now we’ve built a $1 billion stadium and are hosting the Super Bowl and all this frustration and heartbreak has to end sometime, so why not now? Why not in Minnesota, with our heroes at home, with the whole world watching?